The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

June 8, 2016

June 8, 1814

Here is a glimpse of Victorian cats.

Look at those two distant cats fighting. They roll over one another in turn; they bite with visible fury, they scratch... Tigers or theologians could do no more... Now go nearer; you shall find that in these fierce bites tho teeth are somehow kept back entirely, and tho scratching is tickling done with the velvet paw, not tho poisoned iron claw. The fighting resolves itself into two elements, play and affection. These combatants are never strange cats, or cats that bear each other a grudge. And this mock fighting is a favourite gambol with many animals: with none more so than with men and women, especially intelligent and finely tempered ones. Be careful not to do it with a fool. I don't tell you why, because the fool will show you.

And who is the Victorian cat who wrote these words, in, White Lies: A Story (1857)? We quote extensively from the Oxford Dictionary of Biography entry for Charles Reade (June 8, 1814 to April 11, 1884) who was:

..... born.... at Ipsden House, Oxfordshire, the seventh son and tenth and youngest surviving child of John Reade (d. 1849) and his wife, Anna Maria (d. 1862), eldest daughter of Major John Scott (later Scott-Waring) MP, a former associate of Warren Hastings in India. Reade's mother, a devout evangelical, was a friend of Samuel Wilberforce....and other leading low-church clergymen and public figures. Charles was her favourite child and many of his most distinctive qualities as a writer, including his crusading humanitarian zeal, his dogmatism, and blind conviction of his own rightness, and even his brusque prose style, have been plausibly attributed to her influence. His father, a tory squire of the old school, had little in common with his wife and youngest son. ....

....His mother wished him to go to Oxford, expecting that he would enter the church after graduation, and in 1831 he won a demyship at Magdalen College with an essay on ambition and virtue. In 1835, according to the memoir by his son and elder brother, a college fellowship reserved for men born in Oxfordshire fell vacant unexpectedly, spurring him to sit for his final examinations after only three weeks' preparation ...Although a third-class degree-in Greats-was the best he could manage in the circumstances, he was elected probationary fellow on 22 July 1835, Vinerian scholar on 1 December 1835, and fellow of Magdalen in the summer of 1836. His choice as fellow was challenged by a man with a better degree, and his parents and their friends were said to have secured him the Vinerian scholarship by bringing in MAs from miles around to vote for him. He remained a fellow of Magdalen for the rest of his life, serving as junior dean of arts in 1841 and 1843, bursar in 1844 and 1849, vice-president in 1851, and junior bursar in 1859. Once he had taken his MA degree (on 26 April 1838) his fellowship did not require him to reside in Oxford, but in the years of his fame, and particularly in the early 1860s, he did much of his writing in his rooms at Magdalen, using them as a retreat. His tenure of the fellowship was contingent on his remaining unmarried, a stipulation he complained of bitterly but continued to put up with, even when he was earning thousands a year as a writer and would hardly have missed the annual stipend of £250 (which may eventually have risen to £600).

As an undergraduate Reade laid the foundations of his lifelong reputation for eccentricity and nonconformity. He wore his hair unfashionably long, dressed colourfully, devoted all his time to reading, and abstained totally from alcohol and tobacco-as he was to do throughout his life. He was tall and burly, with a tiny head and ungainly gait ...There is nothing to indicate that he ever intended to fall in with his mother's wishes and become ordained. His subsequent life and literary career leave no doubt that he would have found it impossible to submit to the discipline and decorum of the church and to subscribe to all of its teachings, especially those relating to sex. Both his fellowship and his Vinerian scholarship were lay awards, intended to enable him to read law (although later, in 1837 or 1838, he may also briefly have tried medicine, in Edinburgh). ...On 17 February 1842, immediately after being called to the bar, he was elected to a Vinerian fellowship worth £80 a year which he thereafter held in conjunction with his college fellowship. He proceeded to the degree of DCL on 1 July 1847.

.... Reade [later] lived in Soho, near Leicester Square, and pursued a mildly Bohemian existence, eating in out-of-the-way taverns and haunting the theatres. He was elected to the Garrick Club, of which he became a stalwart, on 14 December 1839. In the summer of 1839 he made his first trip abroad, to France and Switzerland. After his return he for the next few years 'oscillated between London, Ipsden, and Scotland' ..... In London he collected, repaired, and traded in Cremona violins, about which he later published four learned articles in the Pall Mall Gazette ... At Ipsden he hunted and shot, played cricket, or boated and fished. In Scotland, where his elder brother William married and settled in 1837, he acquired a herring fishery (which proved unprofitable); more momentously, he fell in love with a pretty young woman, the prototype of his fictional heroine Christie Johnstone, and probably contracted a Scottish (common-law) marriage with her. If Reade's mother found out about the relationship, it can be assumed that she strongly opposed it, just as the mother of Christie's lover opposed his. But Reade continued to live with the young woman, when he could, from 1838 or 1839 until 1848, when she died giving birth to their son. The boy was called Charles Liston, presumably taking his mother's surname; he was passed off as Reade's godson until just before Reade's death, when he took the name Charles Liston Reade and was declared Reade's heir and literary executor....

... [H]is first published novel, Peg Woffington, did not appear until December 1852, when he was thirty-eight, and he was forty-two by the time he achieved his first great success as a novelist with It is Never too Late to Mend (1856). ...

[L]ike other English dramatists at the time, Reade had shown no compunction about adapting or translating French plays without permission; in The Eighth Commandment (1860), the impassioned plea for the sanctity of 'literary property' which he claimed cost him £1000 to publish, he made out that he ceased doing so as soon as the International Copyright Act of 1851 came into force, but the facts suggest otherwise. ....

Reade boasted that all his major novels-It is Never too Late to Mend, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861), Hard Cash (1863), Griffith Gaunt (1866), and Put yourself in his Place (1870)-were written on a scientific 'Baconian' system of induction from documented 'facts'. The subtitle 'A matter-of-fact romance' which he used for It is Never too Late to Mend,Hard Cash, and several of his shorter fictions reflects this aspiration to a documentary adherence to the 'truth', especially in the treatment of social problems. His principal source of facts was newspaper cuttings, which he began collecting in 1848 and continued to accumulate in hundreds of notebooks throughout his writing career. But he also drew unashamedly, often verbatim and at length, on facts set out in other people's books. In It is Never too Late to Mend, for example, the materials for his famously graphic exposure of the sadistic torture of prisoners, including the psychological torments caused by the 'silent and solitary' system in vogue at the time, were drawn partly from his own on-the-spot research at Durham, Oxford, and Reading gaols, partly from newspaper articles-including an opportune report of brutalities at Birmingham gaol in The Times (12 September 1853), but quite largely from a book by Hepworth Dixon, The London Prisons (1850). .... For AGood Fight (1859), the short novel which grew into The Cloister and the Hearth, Reade said that he read seventy-nine books; while for The Cloister and the Hearth itself he filled three 'gigantic cards' with notes about hermits, and for Hard Cash no fewer than forty notecards containing 107,000 words.

In the eyes of many reviewers the authenticity Reade laid claim to, especially when exposing social evils, was largely vitiated by his sensationalism and melodrama, which he defiantly defended ... Several of his novels, particularly Hard Cash, Griffith Gaunt, and A Terrible Temptation (1871), also transgressed Victorian notions of sexual propriety. When Hard Cash (or Very Hard Cash as it was initially titled) reached the end of its serial run in All the Year Round (26 December 1863), Dickens took the extraordinary step of inserting a signed note after the final instalment effectively dissociating himself, as editor, from its 'statements and opinions', and although professing a high regard for Reade he privately considered some of the sexual episodes in Griffith Gaunt 'extremely coarse and disagreeable' .... But Reade's gift for rapid, exciting narrative, lively dialogue, and vivid, often horrific description ensured his popularity. ...He became proverbial for his vigilance and bargaining skills in his dealings with his publishers. The sales of his novels in their initial multi-volume form suffered from a virtual boycott by Mudie's Library, which rejected several of them on the grounds of indecency, but he compensated by obtaining large prices for the serial rights and for the cheaper, one-volume editions, particularly those issued in America where he was the first major English novelist to negotiate directly with publishers.

..... [I]n 1853, he fell in love with ...[a] married actress, Laura Seymour; they began living together then or soon after and continued to do so until Seymour's death in 1879. Though known as Reade's 'housekeeper' she went on practising her profession until the onset of her terminal illness.....

Reade's literary career reached and passed its zenith about 1870. The year before, he and Laura Seymour had moved into a red-brick mansion at 2 Albert Gate, Knightsbridge, beside Hyde Park. In addition to the leasehold of this house he owned three freehold properties in the Brompton Road. All were purchased, presumably, with the huge proceeds of his novels Hard Cash and Griffith Gaunt and his play It's Never too Late to Mend, his first for eight years, which had its London opening at the Princess's Theatre on 4 October 1865, enjoyed a long run there, and was frequently revived afterwards. ....In his new house Reade had a spacious writing-room overlooking the park and ample accommodation for a variety of animals, including at one time a 'small antelope or gazelle'.... Put yourself in his Place, the last three-volume novel written on Reade's 'great system' of laborious fact-gathering, was published in June 1870. It sold well and was received kindly by the reviewers because of its lurid exposure of outrages allegedly committed by trade unions. Subsequently, however, both the quality of his fiction and the lump-sum payments he received for it began to fall away. A Terrible Temptation (1871) achieved a modest succes de scandale after being savagely attacked for its 'indelicacy', and the novelette The Wandering Heir (1873) successfully cashed in on the excitement generated by the Tichborne claimant. But neither these nor any of the other five novels he produced in the 1870s and 1880s did anything to enhance his critical standing. .....

Reade continued to indulge his propensity for litigation, almost regardless of the cost. With a few exceptions, including his earliest recourse to the courts, in March 1857, when he had unsuccessfully sued the publisher Richard Bentley for issuing a cheap edition of Christie Johnstone without his permission, he frequently acted on flimsy, if not vexatious grounds. One of his greatest victories, in a libel case against a New York paper which had branded Griffith Gaunt indecent-a charge Reade had responded to in a pamphlet entitled The Prurient Prude-returned him only a derisory six cents' damages....

Allegations of plagiarism continued to dog Reade, the best-remembered of them arising from Shilly-Shally, his unauthorized dramatization of Anthony Trollope's novel Ralph the Heir, first performed at the Gaiety Theatre on 1 April 1872. Trollope protested angrily and publicly, and for several years afterwards he and Reade did not speak to each other even when playing whist or cribbage together at the Garrick Club. Closer friends like Tom Taylor were more forgiving, not doubting the sincerity of Reade's long campaign for the protection of literary and dramatic copyright in spite of his apparent double standards. At various stages of his career he waged many other campaigns with equal vehemence, and often with an almost laughable one-sidedness. Among the causes he took up were animal welfare and ambidexterity-which he believed all children should be taught. His favourite targets included the incompetence and obfuscations of the medical and legal professions and the institutionalized cruelties practised in prisons and lunatic asylums.... His representations of the punitive tortures inflicted on inmates of prisons and lunatic asylums, which reached a blood-curdling climax in the play It's Never too Late to Mend, set a new standard of gruesome naturalism for the mid-Victorian period and reveal a vicarious sadism also evident, in a milder form, in many of the other scenes of violence in his novels and plays.

For all his polemical combativeness and rhetorical violence, however, Reade seems to have been a soft-spoken man in private, and most of his contemporaries were perhaps more amused than affronted by his public pugnacity and conceit, viewing them, along with his odd physique and unconventional dress, as manifestations of an eccentric individualism that valuably enriched and enlivened the literary scene. Few would have dissented from Justin McCarthy's judgement that Reade:

had a fine and noble nature under all his defects of temper and his inordinate self-esteem. No man was more chivalrous to stand by a cause which he believed to be just, or a friend whom he believed to be injured ...

Convinced of his own genius, Reade made no secret of his scant regard for distinguished rival novelists such as George Eliot. He privately ranked A Good Fight above A Tale of Two Cities-even though he thought Dickens 'the greatest genius of the century' ... A hundred years after his death his novels were all out of print....

Reade moved to 3 Blomfield Villas, Uxbridge Road, London, in 1881 and died there, after a long illness, on 11 April 1884, ....He was buried in Willesden old churchyard, alongside Laura Seymour and her husband, ....

This account reminds us why biography is generally superior to any fiction.